Housed in the Sidra Medical and Research Centre, in the Qatari capital of Doha, the facility’s first aim will be the creation of the Arab consensus genome, to provide a deeper understanding of the genetic variations which contribute to the health of the population group.

Sidra’s Chief Research Officer Dr Francesco Marincola said “Implementing genomic medicine in and around Qatar requires an Arab reference genome set that will provide an in-depth knowledge of genetic variations in the population group. The new level of sequence-based knowledge of genetic variation will allow us to implement genomic medicine systematically and on a large scale.”